In the meat and fish handling industry, knives are used extensively for skinning and boning carcasses of animals, and generally cutting different types of meat and fish, in large quantities for human consumption. Consequently, hygiene considerations are paramount in meat and fish handling places such as abattoirs, meatworks, butchers, fish production and processing plants and fishmongers, given the increased awareness of how disease can be easily spread from contaminated product at these places to the consumer.
For example, health regulations in Australia and New Zealand for abattoirs, require that the knife of a knife handler be thoroughly sterilised in a steriliser at least once every hour to ensure that micro-organisms picked up from the carcasses in the batch handled during that hour, are not passed on to the next batch, and so on. It is proposed that these time periods be decreased, with there even being talk that soon it will be necessary to sterilise a knife after use on just one carcass, before it is allowed to be used on another carcass.
In Europe, the British government is auditing and publishing results, which rank the nation's 1300 abattoirs in descending order according to the abattoir's hygiene performance. Other governments are following this lead.
Whilst these rules and regulations go some way to improving hygiene standards, there is still a need to police and enforce them to ensure that they are observed and complied with. Such policing and enforcement in the meat and fish handling industry is a major problem due to the large numbers of carcasses and fish that are worked on by a knife handler during a shift to meet quota, and the difficulty and cost in continuously watching over the actions of the knife handler. Indeed the knife handler is oftentimes too preoccupied with his or her work to be conscious of regular sterilising times and consequently this is often overlooked, quite unintentionally.
Another problem with the use of knives in such environments is that there is a tendency for them to become displaced, for example, from one area working on skinning of the carcasses, to another area working on gutting, to a further area still working on final cuts of meat, to another area in which the main knife grinding room is located. These different areas may have different hygiene standards, and movement of unsterilised knives from one area to another may be strictly forbidden for the reason that it may pass on dangerous microbes collected in one area to another area.